As with most of you, the blogging platform is the most important part of your blog, in my case, that platform is Wordpress. Without our blogging platform, we’d have no blogs. There are 10’s if not hundreds of blogging platforms out there, it is more or less just a matter of choosing one that you like. I’ve chosen Wordpress for two primary reasons:

1. Wordpress is a free software, and very powerful. It does what it says it does.
2. Wordpress is community driven. This is probably the best feature because it means for hundreds of thousands of available themes and plugins, and the Wordpress platform itself is updated constantly.

Initially, my primary method of publishing posts to my blog was through the built in Wordpress web admin system, but as I became a more “seasoned blogger”, I began using local tools that would allow me to write and save posts to my local machine prior to publishing them to my blog. The first tool that I began using was on a PC, and it was offered by Microsoft – it was called Windows Live Writer. This tool was great and really introduced me to the idea of “offline blogging”. Since converting to a Mac, I’ve found a comparable software that makes offline blogging an absolute breeze. That program is called ecto and it is actually available for both Windows and OSX users.